Prologue: Promoting Local Culture to Repress Dissent

Every morning at 9 a.m., the twenty students of the Amakhosi Arts
Academy in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe line up on the stage of an outdoor amphitheater
to stretch their physical and vocal limits in an intensive three-hour
workout. Afterwards they sit down to
write original songs, choreograph dances, develop ideas for documentary videos,
and design their own theater productions.
When classes end at 5 p.m., the exhausted students return to varied home
lives. Some sit down to dinner with
their parents. A few feed their own
young children. Others have no immediate
family left alive and turn to friends or relatives for something to eat.

Once hailed as the breadbasket of Africa, by 2000 Zimbabwe could no
longer feed itself. Since then its
economy has contracted by a third, “a far worse decline than was seen during
full-scale civil wars in other African countries.”[1] Fuel rations ran out, inflation soared, and
business ground to a halt. Unemployment
among youth in the Amakhosi students’ 18 to 24 year-old age group grew from 50%
to 80%.[2] At the time and in this context, no
Zimbabwean teenager would have dreamed of supporting himself through art. Today, however, things have changed.

One man transformed the prospects for aspiring local artists. In 2000, President Robert Mugabe made
Jonathan Moyo, a former political science professor, Zimbabwe’s new Minister of
Information. Once in office, Moyo turned
the government’s TV and radio monopoly into a platform for local artists. He produced “cultural galas,” which gave new
musicians a chance to tour the country with the state providing room, board,
and a salary. Moyo even helped record,
market, and distribute twenty new music albums during his years in office. His ministry invested ZW$2 billion (official
exchange rate: US$2.4 million; unofficial: $660,000 in 2004) inmovie directors and scriptwriters between 2000-2004 to
help them come up with documentaries and television dramas.[3]And in 2001, Amakhosi’s new video production studio
received ZW$500,000 (official:
US$10,000; unofficial: US$6,250) from the Ministry of Information to
produce a new TV show called Amakorokoza,
which featured the talents of its students.[4] This was the first grant Amakhosi ever received
from the government.

This is puzzling because Amakhosi has never been, and still is not, a
friend of the government. Since 1980,
its founder Cont Mhlanga has been one of the strongest voices to oppose the
regime. As one writer put it, "The mere mention
of his [Mhlanga’s] name [has always] invoked thoughts of a growing band of
young and talented artists seeking, against all odds –including being monitored
by those men in “dark glasses” – to expose ZANU-PF [ruling party] evils through
song, dance and poetry."[5]

Mhlanga’s
1986 satirical play Workshop Negative
was an internationally acclaimed satire about the corruption and hypocrisy of
President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front
(ZANU-PF) party. Again in 2000, Mhlanga
launched citizen mobilization workshops in rural areas, using community-based
theater to empower citizens. Mhlanga has
long urged his audiences and his students to become proactive citizens and
reclaim Zimbabwe from what he considers a cruel and callous regime. Why, then, is he getting money from this
regime? Why are many of his arts
students grateful to the government for giving them the chance to realize their
creative dreams? Why is the government
supporting a generation of young artists and filmmakers who will likely use
their voices to covertly and openly criticize the ruling party?

These
questions became particularly poignant when, arriving in Harare, Zimbabwe on
July 4, 2005, I witnessed the results of the recent “Operation Murambatsvina,”
(“Drive Out the Trash”) campaign. The
operation was the ruling party’s most destructive attempt to quash urban
opposition in two decades. Army and
police brigades marched unannounced into urban communities and tore down
homes. It is not clear why; perhaps it
was a punishment for voting against ZANU-PF or an attempt to prevent popular
uprisings in the future.[6] Brigades gave inhabitants one hour’s warning
before pushing them out onto the streets.
With winter approaching, 550,000 Zimbabweans out of a population of 12
million lost their homes. They were
transferred to guarded displacement camps and were locked within while police
patrolled the perimeter.[7]

I
lived for three weeks with a journalist in the city. On my third day several Zimbabwean reporters
invited me to join them as they snuck into a displaced persons camp. They said few international eyes had ever
seen these camps in person or through photos.
I took up their offer and we drove together in an old Red Cross van past
heaps of brick, concrete, and burnt wood where there were once
communities. We passed through a police
checkpoint and then into the shantytown.
Hundreds of women stood in a line.
They had waited all day for sanitation pads. Old men and young children stood before their
new homes, which consisted of open garbage bags stretched thin across scrap
metal and wood. The journalists fanned
out and started taking pictures surreptitiously of people surviving off of
radishes and children shivering in the cold.

I
walked alone until an elderly man in a dark blue three-piece suit caked in dust
called me over. When forced from his
home at gunpoint, he had insisted on wearing his best attire, trying to
maintain dignity when his life was stripped away. He said he was a hardworking, respectable man
with a son studying engineering in South Africa. He looked tired as he insisted that he, like
others in the camp, were decent people.
State radio broadcasts all said otherwise, describing how “criminal,
lazy or insane” urban squatters had been “successfully transplanted to real
homes.”[8]

Soon
after I left the site that afternoon, the police arrested one of the
photojournalists. She was taken to headquarters and interrogated for twelve
hours. Luckily, only her camera was
confiscated and she left unharmed. The police told her that the camp was a
politically sensitive site and that “journalist spies” had to be stopped from
undermining national security. Back home
and safe, eating puffy mealy meal sadza, she joked that people reduced to
penury, old homeless men and malnourished children, could hardly threaten the
security of a twenty-five-year-old regime.
Nevertheless, as a journalist, she hoped that their broadcast stories
and images could inform and empower citizens.

I
was compelled by the idea of using representation to counter repression. Over the next two months, I decided to live
and work at Amakhosi Arts Academy teaching documentary video to youth alongside
Cont Mhlanga. Yet each day I wondered
why the threatened ZANU-PF government would give cameras to students who form
its core political opposition while so anxiously monitoring the images
produced. It is common for repressive
regimes to rely on harsh restrictions of media output to solidify power. But why did Zimbabwe increase creative access
at the same time? This thesis attempts
to answer that question, and to make sense of the contradictory experiences
that first captured my interest in representation and repression in Zimbabwe
today.

[3] Over the past decade, the
inflation rate in Zimbabwe has skyrocketed from 10% in 1997 to 1000% in 2006.
Conversions throughout the thesis are made into the same-year U.S. dollar (USD)
equivalent. Relative to the Zimbabwean
dollar at least, the USD has proved relatively stable throughout the years and
has not changed too substantially in value.